What main advantage do security logs provide during compliance audits?

Security logs play a crucial role during compliance audits primarily because they help track and investigate security incidents. This capability is essential for organizations to demonstrate adherence to regulatory requirements. Compliance audits often require detailed records of security activities to ensure that an organization is following best practices and being proactive about security risks.

By maintaining comprehensive security logs, organizations can provide auditors with evidence of their security posture, incident response, and how they managed and mitigated any potential threats. These logs can include information such as access records, changes made to critical systems, and alerts generated from security devices, all of which are valuable for tracing the sequence of events if a security incident does occur.

The other options do not directly contribute to the main advantage of security logs in an audit context. Enhancing software performance, ensuring data encryption, and improving user access controls are important aspects of security management, but they do not fundamentally address the need for accountability, traceability, and incident investigation that security logs provide during compliance audits.